The central question engaged in this book is the following: why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? This study examines the way influential 20th-century ...
More

The central question engaged in this book is the following: why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? This study examines the way influential 20th-century critics have understood and deployed Emerson as part of their own larger projects aimed at reconceiving America. It examines previously unpublished material and original research on Van Wyck Brooks, Perry Miller, F. O. Matthiessen, and Sacvan Bercovitch along with other supporting thinkers. Emerging from this research is an in-depth account of Emerson's cultural construction as well as an institutional history of American literary studies in the 20th century. This book is also a fine-grained study of how the relationship between a scholar's individual perspective and prevailing cultural conditions merge together to impel critics to redirect the course of a present moment — often experienced as disappointing and unfulfilled — toward a desired future. When an engaged but theoretical mind meets with an impassive history, the response that follows, for some of our most imaginative and brilliant critics, has led, often and suggestively, to a turn toward Emerson.Less

Emerson's Ghosts : Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists

Randall Fuller

Published in print: 2007-10-01

The central question engaged in this book is the following: why does Emerson's cultural legacy continue to influence writers so forcefully? This study examines the way influential 20th-century critics have understood and deployed Emerson as part of their own larger projects aimed at reconceiving America. It examines previously unpublished material and original research on Van Wyck Brooks, Perry Miller, F. O. Matthiessen, and Sacvan Bercovitch along with other supporting thinkers. Emerging from this research is an in-depth account of Emerson's cultural construction as well as an institutional history of American literary studies in the 20th century. This book is also a fine-grained study of how the relationship between a scholar's individual perspective and prevailing cultural conditions merge together to impel critics to redirect the course of a present moment — often experienced as disappointing and unfulfilled — toward a desired future. When an engaged but theoretical mind meets with an impassive history, the response that follows, for some of our most imaginative and brilliant critics, has led, often and suggestively, to a turn toward Emerson.

The author of the book presents a full-length philosophical study of the work of Stanley Cavell, best known for his highly influential contributions to the fields of film studies, Shakespearian ...
More

The author of the book presents a full-length philosophical study of the work of Stanley Cavell, best known for his highly influential contributions to the fields of film studies, Shakespearian literary criticism, and the confluence of psychoanalysis and literary theory. It is not properly appreciated that Cavell's project originated in his interpretation of Austin's and Wittgenstein's philosophical interest in the criteria governing ordinary language, and is given unity by an abiding concern with the nature and the varying cultural manifestations of the sceptical impulse in modernity. This book elucidates the essentially philosophical roots and trajectory of Cavell's work, traces its links with Romanticism and its recent turn towards a species of moral pefectionism associated with Thoreau and Emerson, and concludes with an assessment of its relations to liberal-democratic political theory, Christian religious thought, and feminist literary studies.Less

Stanley Cavell : Philosophy's Recounting of the Ordinary

Stephen Mulhall

Published in print: 1999-01-07

The author of the book presents a full-length philosophical study of the work of Stanley Cavell, best known for his highly influential contributions to the fields of film studies, Shakespearian literary criticism, and the confluence of psychoanalysis and literary theory. It is not properly appreciated that Cavell's project originated in his interpretation of Austin's and Wittgenstein's philosophical interest in the criteria governing ordinary language, and is given unity by an abiding concern with the nature and the varying cultural manifestations of the sceptical impulse in modernity. This book elucidates the essentially philosophical roots and trajectory of Cavell's work, traces its links with Romanticism and its recent turn towards a species of moral pefectionism associated with Thoreau and Emerson, and concludes with an assessment of its relations to liberal-democratic political theory, Christian religious thought, and feminist literary studies.

Buddhism has created a place for itself in the modern ecology of ideas and practices by placing itself within and between three key discourses of modernity: those of scientific naturalism, ...
More

Buddhism has created a place for itself in the modern ecology of ideas and practices by placing itself within and between three key discourses of modernity: those of scientific naturalism, Romanticism and Transcendentalism, and Christianity. Specifically, it aligned itself with scientific rationalism over against conservative, missionary forms of Christianity, while borrowing from Christianity’s more liberal and mystical elements. Nevertheless, it has also been critical of positivistic and scientistic modes of rationalism, and in articulating this critique it has drawn on the Romantic-Transcendentalist cosmology and their stress on the value of interior experience. This chapter shows how foundational Buddhist modernists like Soen Shaku and Dwight Goddard re-configured Buddhist concepts in the languages of rationalism, Romanticism, and Christianity, carving out a space for Buddhism in the tensions between these discourses.Less

Buddhism and the Discourses of Modernity

David L. McMahan

Published in print: 2009-02-01

Buddhism has created a place for itself in the modern ecology of ideas and practices by placing itself within and between three key discourses of modernity: those of scientific naturalism, Romanticism and Transcendentalism, and Christianity. Specifically, it aligned itself with scientific rationalism over against conservative, missionary forms of Christianity, while borrowing from Christianity’s more liberal and mystical elements. Nevertheless, it has also been critical of positivistic and scientistic modes of rationalism, and in articulating this critique it has drawn on the Romantic-Transcendentalist cosmology and their stress on the value of interior experience. This chapter shows how foundational Buddhist modernists like Soen Shaku and Dwight Goddard re-configured Buddhist concepts in the languages of rationalism, Romanticism, and Christianity, carving out a space for Buddhism in the tensions between these discourses.

This chapter discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson's prophetic announcement of both the decay of orthodox, institutional religion and the ascent of a solitary spirituality founded upon the intuition of the ...
More

This chapter discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson's prophetic announcement of both the decay of orthodox, institutional religion and the ascent of a solitary spirituality founded upon the intuition of the “moral sentiment.” Matthew Mutter argues that this dual expectation is made possible by a radicalization of the Puritan project of integrating the sacred and the secular. This radicalization ultimately placed the burden of sacred order on the vision of the perceiving individual, which in turn diminished the significance of outward social and political arrangements. Attention is given to Emerson's misapprehension of the actual trends in nineteenth‐century American religious life, to the differences between Emerson's prophetic stance and those of Whitman, Thoreau, Melville and Lincoln, and to the effects of the Civil War on Emerson's thought and American public religion in general. The conclusion looks at Emerson's legacy in American religious history.Less

The Romantic Era : Emerson's Churches of One

Matthew Mutter

Published in print: 2008-09-01

This chapter discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson's prophetic announcement of both the decay of orthodox, institutional religion and the ascent of a solitary spirituality founded upon the intuition of the “moral sentiment.” Matthew Mutter argues that this dual expectation is made possible by a radicalization of the Puritan project of integrating the sacred and the secular. This radicalization ultimately placed the burden of sacred order on the vision of the perceiving individual, which in turn diminished the significance of outward social and political arrangements. Attention is given to Emerson's misapprehension of the actual trends in nineteenth‐century American religious life, to the differences between Emerson's prophetic stance and those of Whitman, Thoreau, Melville and Lincoln, and to the effects of the Civil War on Emerson's thought and American public religion in general. The conclusion looks at Emerson's legacy in American religious history.

This chapter examines how the notion of medieval American literature not only makes a paradoxical kind of sense but might be seen as integral to the construction of the subject more generally. It ...
More

This chapter examines how the notion of medieval American literature not only makes a paradoxical kind of sense but might be seen as integral to the construction of the subject more generally. It argues that antebellum narratives situate native soil on a highly charged and fraught boundary between past and present, circumference and displacement. In itself, the idea of medieval American literature is hardly more peculiar than F. O. Matthiessen's conception of an “American Renaissance.” Matthiessen sought to justify his subject by aligning nineteenth-century American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne with seventeenth-century English forerunners such as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The chapter considers resonances of medievalism within nineteenth-century American culture and how many antebellum writers consciously foreground within their texts the shifting, permeable boundaries of time and space, suggesting how fiction and cartography, the writing of history and the writing of geography, are commensurate with each other.Less

Medieval American Literature: Antebellum Narratives and the “Map of the Infinite”

Paul Giles

Published in print: 2011-01-23

This chapter examines how the notion of medieval American literature not only makes a paradoxical kind of sense but might be seen as integral to the construction of the subject more generally. It argues that antebellum narratives situate native soil on a highly charged and fraught boundary between past and present, circumference and displacement. In itself, the idea of medieval American literature is hardly more peculiar than F. O. Matthiessen's conception of an “American Renaissance.” Matthiessen sought to justify his subject by aligning nineteenth-century American writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne with seventeenth-century English forerunners such as William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The chapter considers resonances of medievalism within nineteenth-century American culture and how many antebellum writers consciously foreground within their texts the shifting, permeable boundaries of time and space, suggesting how fiction and cartography, the writing of history and the writing of geography, are commensurate with each other.

Cavell's two greatest influences, Emerson and Wittgenstein, are often considered either to lack a politics or to reinforce a conservative politics. This chapter places Cavell in conversation with ...
More

Cavell's two greatest influences, Emerson and Wittgenstein, are often considered either to lack a politics or to reinforce a conservative politics. This chapter places Cavell in conversation with work in political liberalism by Martha Nussbaum and John Rawls. The comparison illuminates how, in Cavell's hands, Emerson and Wittgenstein are both radical democrats whose perfectionism exposes liberal democracy's complacency with regard to its victims.Less

Scenes of Instruction

Peter Dula

Published in print: 2010-11-16

Cavell's two greatest influences, Emerson and Wittgenstein, are often considered either to lack a politics or to reinforce a conservative politics. This chapter places Cavell in conversation with work in political liberalism by Martha Nussbaum and John Rawls. The comparison illuminates how, in Cavell's hands, Emerson and Wittgenstein are both radical democrats whose perfectionism exposes liberal democracy's complacency with regard to its victims.

Recent decades have seen a renewed interest in ecclesiology as postliberal theologians, such as Hauer was, have found it useful to ally with communitarian critics in order to promote the church as an ...
More

Recent decades have seen a renewed interest in ecclesiology as postliberal theologians, such as Hauer was, have found it useful to ally with communitarian critics in order to promote the church as an alternative to individualism. In doing so, they have often enlisted Wittgenstein as an ally. Much of this work has been laudable, yet it seems to have been accompanied by an inability to also speak articulately about the individuals in those communities. By attending to the place of Augustine's Confessions in the Philosophical Investigations, this chapter reads Wittgenstein alongside Emerson in an attempt to distance him from the communitarians.Less

Evidence of Habitation

Peter Dula

Published in print: 2010-11-16

Recent decades have seen a renewed interest in ecclesiology as postliberal theologians, such as Hauer was, have found it useful to ally with communitarian critics in order to promote the church as an alternative to individualism. In doing so, they have often enlisted Wittgenstein as an ally. Much of this work has been laudable, yet it seems to have been accompanied by an inability to also speak articulately about the individuals in those communities. By attending to the place of Augustine's Confessions in the Philosophical Investigations, this chapter reads Wittgenstein alongside Emerson in an attempt to distance him from the communitarians.

While Emerson is an indispensable resource for Cavell, Cavell worries about the “lack of a concrete other” in Emerson's work. Emerson prefers instead to turn to nature or to “the great man” as the ...
More

While Emerson is an indispensable resource for Cavell, Cavell worries about the “lack of a concrete other” in Emerson's work. Emerson prefers instead to turn to nature or to “the great man” as the other who is necessary for the self's transformation. Cavell's work, however, is full of such concrete others, most obviously in the comedies of remarriage. Less obvious is Cavell's insistence on acknowledging the victim, ours or society's. Such a claim is foundational to Christian theology. Building on Cavell's assertion that “the crucified human body is our best picture of the unacknowledged human soul,” this chapter turns to Rowan Williams, Sebastian Moore, and Herbert McCabe to provide theological companionship for Cavell's anthropology.Less

Truly Human

Peter Dula

Published in print: 2010-11-16

While Emerson is an indispensable resource for Cavell, Cavell worries about the “lack of a concrete other” in Emerson's work. Emerson prefers instead to turn to nature or to “the great man” as the other who is necessary for the self's transformation. Cavell's work, however, is full of such concrete others, most obviously in the comedies of remarriage. Less obvious is Cavell's insistence on acknowledging the victim, ours or society's. Such a claim is foundational to Christian theology. Building on Cavell's assertion that “the crucified human body is our best picture of the unacknowledged human soul,” this chapter turns to Rowan Williams, Sebastian Moore, and Herbert McCabe to provide theological companionship for Cavell's anthropology.

This chapter examines the Dial (1840-44), the magazine of the American romantics, which appeared in New England almost exactly contemporaneously with the Lowell Offering. The Dial's contributors, ...
More

This chapter examines the Dial (1840-44), the magazine of the American romantics, which appeared in New England almost exactly contemporaneously with the Lowell Offering. The Dial's contributors, like the Offering's, explored the possibilities for the full development of mind, soul, and body within the context of the dramatic changes in mid-19th century American society. Like the Offering, for much of its duration the Dial was under the editorship of a woman, in this case Margaret Fuller, who tried to expand the romantic ideals of male transcendentalists and test their applicability to women. Although she did not extend this expansion to women outside her own social and educational class during her Dial years, she demonstrated in her writing new possibilities and directions for intellectually ambitious women and in her life the quest for new work and untried experiences. While many transcendentalists, like Emerson, remained distinctly class-bound in their daily lives, they celebrated in their writing a hope for individual intellectual autonomy that recognized no limits. Thus they made a profound impression on a much broader range of people than the brief list of subscribers to their little magazine might suggest, including working women who went unmentioned in their pages but read them avidly.Less

Across the Gulf : The Transcendentalists, the Dial, and Margaret Fuller

Sylvia Jenkins Cook

Published in print: 2008-02-21

This chapter examines the Dial (1840-44), the magazine of the American romantics, which appeared in New England almost exactly contemporaneously with the Lowell Offering. The Dial's contributors, like the Offering's, explored the possibilities for the full development of mind, soul, and body within the context of the dramatic changes in mid-19th century American society. Like the Offering, for much of its duration the Dial was under the editorship of a woman, in this case Margaret Fuller, who tried to expand the romantic ideals of male transcendentalists and test their applicability to women. Although she did not extend this expansion to women outside her own social and educational class during her Dial years, she demonstrated in her writing new possibilities and directions for intellectually ambitious women and in her life the quest for new work and untried experiences. While many transcendentalists, like Emerson, remained distinctly class-bound in their daily lives, they celebrated in their writing a hope for individual intellectual autonomy that recognized no limits. Thus they made a profound impression on a much broader range of people than the brief list of subscribers to their little magazine might suggest, including working women who went unmentioned in their pages but read them avidly.

Romanticism brings back the twinned concepts of preexistence and theosis. The revival of Plato (under Thomas Taylor's influence) sparks revival of interest in preexistence especially. William Blake, ...
More

Romanticism brings back the twinned concepts of preexistence and theosis. The revival of Plato (under Thomas Taylor's influence) sparks revival of interest in preexistence especially. William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Coleridge are only the most prominent names among the Romantics, as is Alfred, Lord Tennyson among the Victorians, and Ralph Waldo Emerson among the Transcendentalists, to espouse preexistence.Less

Romanticism and Transcendentalism, 1800–1900

Terryl L. Givens

Published in print: 2009-09-10

Romanticism brings back the twinned concepts of preexistence and theosis. The revival of Plato (under Thomas Taylor's influence) sparks revival of interest in preexistence especially. William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Coleridge are only the most prominent names among the Romantics, as is Alfred, Lord Tennyson among the Victorians, and Ralph Waldo Emerson among the Transcendentalists, to espouse preexistence.

By the early nineteenth century, in writings by Bryant, Cooper, and Emerson, one can observe a growing Romantic tendency to imagine Nature in religious terms--as a favored site of worship and a ...
More

By the early nineteenth century, in writings by Bryant, Cooper, and Emerson, one can observe a growing Romantic tendency to imagine Nature in religious terms--as a favored site of worship and a source of revelation largely superseding the Christian scriptures. Both literary artists and Hudson River painters highlighted their impressions of the sacred sublime in American landscapes. And as civilized settlements continued to replace the older freedom of life on the frontier, James Fenimore Cooper dramatized the problematic ethical consequences of this change in his Leatherstocking novels, above all in The Pioneers. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s vision of the nonhuman world as divine “cosmos,” or “beauty” is most memorably presented in his book Nature (1836), which celebrates the intersection between Nature and Civilization he discovered on the “common” space of a village green in Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson’s poem “The Adirondacs,” which describes a camping excursion interrupted by news of laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable, underscores the point that no part of nature could henceforth be wholly removed from human presence or influence.Less

John Gatta

Published in print: 2004-10-21

By the early nineteenth century, in writings by Bryant, Cooper, and Emerson, one can observe a growing Romantic tendency to imagine Nature in religious terms--as a favored site of worship and a source of revelation largely superseding the Christian scriptures. Both literary artists and Hudson River painters highlighted their impressions of the sacred sublime in American landscapes. And as civilized settlements continued to replace the older freedom of life on the frontier, James Fenimore Cooper dramatized the problematic ethical consequences of this change in his Leatherstocking novels, above all in The Pioneers. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s vision of the nonhuman world as divine “cosmos,” or “beauty” is most memorably presented in his book Nature (1836), which celebrates the intersection between Nature and Civilization he discovered on the “common” space of a village green in Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson’s poem “The Adirondacs,” which describes a camping excursion interrupted by news of laying the first transatlantic telegraph cable, underscores the point that no part of nature could henceforth be wholly removed from human presence or influence.

This chapter introduces the reader to the key themes of the book and outlines the content and argument of the succeeding chapters. The claim of Mission Mississippi to be changing Mississippi one ...
More

This chapter introduces the reader to the key themes of the book and outlines the content and argument of the succeeding chapters. The claim of Mission Mississippi to be changing Mississippi one relationship at a time is juxtaposed with the sociologists Michael O Emerson and Christian Smith's claim that evangelicals' emphasis on individual relationships rather than systemic injustice makes them part of the problem of race in America. If the sociologist's concerns prove founded, should churches abandon a theology of friendship in their search for racial reconciliation, or does Mission Mississippi's experience help in the development of a particular Christian understanding of friendship robust enough to address issues of systemic injustice and inequity in a racialized society?Less

Introduction

Peter Slade

Published in print: 2009-11-05

This chapter introduces the reader to the key themes of the book and outlines the content and argument of the succeeding chapters. The claim of Mission Mississippi to be changing Mississippi one relationship at a time is juxtaposed with the sociologists Michael O Emerson and Christian Smith's claim that evangelicals' emphasis on individual relationships rather than systemic injustice makes them part of the problem of race in America. If the sociologist's concerns prove founded, should churches abandon a theology of friendship in their search for racial reconciliation, or does Mission Mississippi's experience help in the development of a particular Christian understanding of friendship robust enough to address issues of systemic injustice and inequity in a racialized society?

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Universalist movement gained both momentum and attention. Although still a small minority, Universalists stirred up widespread controversy with ...
More

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Universalist movement gained both momentum and attention. Although still a small minority, Universalists stirred up widespread controversy with their improved version of Calvinism. They faced massive opposition, even persecution, with almost all who denounced them united in a single fundamental criticism: their teaching ignored the basic lesson that all people were responsible before God for their actions, that goodness would be rewarded, and evil punished. Universalists responded by trying to show that “the larger hope” of their faith transcended such “carnal”concerns and was conducive to social concord, and for at least a generation after the turn of the century, the Universalist vision represented a genuine challenge to the religious and moral norms that accommodated the needs of a burgeoning capitalist society. However, the movement as a whole did not continue to sustain and develop the sort of spirituality that was reflected in Hosea Ballou’s teaching; the communal piety of early Universalism proved an unsatisfactory foundation, and the movement ultimately moved toward the moralism against which its early adherents had struggled. Ironically, the form of non-moralistic spirituality that gained lasting recognition in American religious history was not the popular preaching of Universalism but the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which while sharing certain themes with early Universalism, ultimately reflected a profoundly different orientation that was more closely in line with the broader tendencies of nineteenth-century American culture.Less

The Challenge of Communal Piety

Ann Lee Bressler

Published in print: 2001-05-17

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Universalist movement gained both momentum and attention. Although still a small minority, Universalists stirred up widespread controversy with their improved version of Calvinism. They faced massive opposition, even persecution, with almost all who denounced them united in a single fundamental criticism: their teaching ignored the basic lesson that all people were responsible before God for their actions, that goodness would be rewarded, and evil punished. Universalists responded by trying to show that “the larger hope” of their faith transcended such “carnal”concerns and was conducive to social concord, and for at least a generation after the turn of the century, the Universalist vision represented a genuine challenge to the religious and moral norms that accommodated the needs of a burgeoning capitalist society. However, the movement as a whole did not continue to sustain and develop the sort of spirituality that was reflected in Hosea Ballou’s teaching; the communal piety of early Universalism proved an unsatisfactory foundation, and the movement ultimately moved toward the moralism against which its early adherents had struggled. Ironically, the form of non-moralistic spirituality that gained lasting recognition in American religious history was not the popular preaching of Universalism but the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which while sharing certain themes with early Universalism, ultimately reflected a profoundly different orientation that was more closely in line with the broader tendencies of nineteenth-century American culture.

This book deals with narratives of cultural legitimation in nineteenth-century US literature, in a transatlantic context. Exploring how literary professionalism shapes romantic and modern cultural ...
More

This book deals with narratives of cultural legitimation in nineteenth-century US literature, in a transatlantic context. Exploring how literary professionalism shapes romantic and modern cultural space, the author traces the nineteenth-century fusion of poetic radicalism with cultural nationalism from its beginnings in transatlantic early romanticism, to the poetry and poetics of Walt Whitman, and Whitman's modernist reinvention as an icon of a native avant-garde. Whitman made cultural nationalism compatible with the rhetorical needs of professional authorship by trying to hold national authenticity and literary authority in a single poetic vision. Yet the notion that his ‘language experiment’ transformed essential democratic experience into a genuine American aesthetics also owes much to Whitman's retrospective canonization. What the author calls Whitmanian authority is thus a transatlantic and transhistorical discursive construct that can be approached from four angles. The book begins with an overview of transatlantic contexts such as the nineteenth-century literary field (Bourdieu) and the romantic turn to expressivism (Taylor). The author gives a detailed analysis of how Whitman's positions develop from the intellectual habitus, a cultural criticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and locates Whitmanian authority within three conceptual fields that function as contact zones for European and American theories of culture – romantic notions of national style as a kind of music. The book provides place-centred concepts of national aesthetics and traditional ideas about the aesthetic effects of democratic institutions. The final section, on Whitman's reinvention between the 1870s and the 1940s, discusses how the heterogeneous nineteenth-century perceptions of Whitman's work were streamlined into a modernist version of Whitman's nationalist program.Less

Cultural Authority in the Age of Whitman : A Transatlantic Perspective

Gunter Leypoldt

Published in print: 2009-09-16

This book deals with narratives of cultural legitimation in nineteenth-century US literature, in a transatlantic context. Exploring how literary professionalism shapes romantic and modern cultural space, the author traces the nineteenth-century fusion of poetic radicalism with cultural nationalism from its beginnings in transatlantic early romanticism, to the poetry and poetics of Walt Whitman, and Whitman's modernist reinvention as an icon of a native avant-garde. Whitman made cultural nationalism compatible with the rhetorical needs of professional authorship by trying to hold national authenticity and literary authority in a single poetic vision. Yet the notion that his ‘language experiment’ transformed essential democratic experience into a genuine American aesthetics also owes much to Whitman's retrospective canonization. What the author calls Whitmanian authority is thus a transatlantic and transhistorical discursive construct that can be approached from four angles. The book begins with an overview of transatlantic contexts such as the nineteenth-century literary field (Bourdieu) and the romantic turn to expressivism (Taylor). The author gives a detailed analysis of how Whitman's positions develop from the intellectual habitus, a cultural criticism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and locates Whitmanian authority within three conceptual fields that function as contact zones for European and American theories of culture – romantic notions of national style as a kind of music. The book provides place-centred concepts of national aesthetics and traditional ideas about the aesthetic effects of democratic institutions. The final section, on Whitman's reinvention between the 1870s and the 1940s, discusses how the heterogeneous nineteenth-century perceptions of Whitman's work were streamlined into a modernist version of Whitman's nationalist program.

In colonial America, only 15% of the population belonged to a church. The majority was nonetheless spiritual at a personal level, but fashioned their personal beliefs by drawing upon a variety of ...
More

In colonial America, only 15% of the population belonged to a church. The majority was nonetheless spiritual at a personal level, but fashioned their personal beliefs by drawing upon a variety of magical and occult philosophies. Astrology, divination, and witchcraft permeated everyday life in the colonies. By the early and mid‐nineteenth century, the writings of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and the American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson gave middle‐class Americans a new vocabulary for describing their inner‐relationship to unseen spiritual dimensions of life. And, by the latter part of the nineteenth century, both mesmerism and spiritualism provided general audiences with new ways of exploring this inner‐relationship to the spirit world.Less

The Emergence of Unchurched Traditions

Robert C. Fuller

Published in print: 2001-11-15

In colonial America, only 15% of the population belonged to a church. The majority was nonetheless spiritual at a personal level, but fashioned their personal beliefs by drawing upon a variety of magical and occult philosophies. Astrology, divination, and witchcraft permeated everyday life in the colonies. By the early and mid‐nineteenth century, the writings of the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and the American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson gave middle‐class Americans a new vocabulary for describing their inner‐relationship to unseen spiritual dimensions of life. And, by the latter part of the nineteenth century, both mesmerism and spiritualism provided general audiences with new ways of exploring this inner‐relationship to the spirit world.

This chapter explores the creation and growth of the American Eugenics Society, whose energetic efforts to woo religious supporters met with remarkable success throughout the 1920s. The chapter ...
More

This chapter explores the creation and growth of the American Eugenics Society, whose energetic efforts to woo religious supporters met with remarkable success throughout the 1920s. The chapter describes the Society’s Committee on Cooperation with Clergymen, headed by Rev. Henry Strong Huntington, which counted many prominent religious leaders as members, as well as the Society’s multiple “eugenic sermon contests,” which drew enthusiastic entrants from across the country and from a wide denominational spectrum. The chapter traces the participation of religious leaders such as Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, Bishop William Lawrence, Rev. Guy Emery Shipler, Rev. Phillips Endecott Osgood, Bishop Francis John McConnell, and Rabbis Louis Mann and David de Sola Pool. It also describes the successful efforts of the society’s most skilled eugenics propagandist, Albert Edward Wiggam.Less

Eugenicists Discover Jesus

Christine Rosen

Published in print: 2004-03-18

This chapter explores the creation and growth of the American Eugenics Society, whose energetic efforts to woo religious supporters met with remarkable success throughout the 1920s. The chapter describes the Society’s Committee on Cooperation with Clergymen, headed by Rev. Henry Strong Huntington, which counted many prominent religious leaders as members, as well as the Society’s multiple “eugenic sermon contests,” which drew enthusiastic entrants from across the country and from a wide denominational spectrum. The chapter traces the participation of religious leaders such as Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, Bishop William Lawrence, Rev. Guy Emery Shipler, Rev. Phillips Endecott Osgood, Bishop Francis John McConnell, and Rabbis Louis Mann and David de Sola Pool. It also describes the successful efforts of the society’s most skilled eugenics propagandist, Albert Edward Wiggam.

This chapter goes back to the beginning. It covers Gu”non’s life from birth until 1908, and examines the nature and consequences of his involvement during the Belle Epoque with the Martinist Order ...
More

This chapter goes back to the beginning. It covers Gu”non’s life from birth until 1908, and examines the nature and consequences of his involvement during the Belle Epoque with the Martinist Order and other occultist groups led by “Papus,”as well as in Gu”non’s own short-lived occultist group, the Renewed Order of the Temple. The chapter also examines the origins of Perennialism in fifteenth-century Italy, of Freemasonry in sixteenth-century Scotland, and of Western interest in Hinduism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (in India with Reuben Burrow, in Britain and France, and in America with Ralph Waldo Emerson). It traces these three influences on Gu”non through Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society and Encausse, as well as parallel influences on Gu”non’s collaborator Coomaraswamy.Less

Perennialism

Mark Sedgwick

Published in print: 2004-06-17

This chapter goes back to the beginning. It covers Gu”non’s life from birth until 1908, and examines the nature and consequences of his involvement during the Belle Epoque with the Martinist Order and other occultist groups led by “Papus,”as well as in Gu”non’s own short-lived occultist group, the Renewed Order of the Temple. The chapter also examines the origins of Perennialism in fifteenth-century Italy, of Freemasonry in sixteenth-century Scotland, and of Western interest in Hinduism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (in India with Reuben Burrow, in Britain and France, and in America with Ralph Waldo Emerson). It traces these three influences on Gu”non through Helena Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society and Encausse, as well as parallel influences on Gu”non’s collaborator Coomaraswamy.

Andrea Knutson

Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature, American, 19th Century Literature

This study examines how the concept of conversion and specifically the legacy of the doctrine of preparation, as articulated in Puritan Reformed theology and transplanted to the Massachusetts Bay ...
More

This study examines how the concept of conversion and specifically the legacy of the doctrine of preparation, as articulated in Puritan Reformed theology and transplanted to the Massachusetts Bay colony, remained a vital cultural force shaping developments in American literature and philosophy. It begins by discussing the testimonies of conversion collected by the Puritan minister Thomas Shepard, which reveal an active pursuit of belief by prospective church members occurring at the intersection of experience, perception, doctrine, affections, and intellect. This pursuit of belief, codified in the morphology of conversion, and originally undertaken by the Puritans as a way to conceptualize redemption in a fallen state, established the epistemological contours for what Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James would theorize as a conductive imaginary—consciousness imagined as a space organized or that self-organizes around the dynamics and tensions between abstract truth and concrete realities, certainty and uncertainty, and perception and objects perceived. Each writer offers a picture of consciousness as both a receptive and active force responsible for translating the effects of experience and generating original relations with self, community, and God. This study demonstrates that each writer “ministered” to their audiences by articulating a method or habit of mind in order to foster an individual’s continual efforts at regeneration, conceived by all the subjects of this study as a matter of converting semantics, that is, a dedicated willingness to seeking out personal and cultural renewal through the continual process of attaching new meaning and value to ordinary contexts.Less

American Spaces of Conversion : The Conductive Imaginaries of Edwards, Emerson, and James

Andrea Knutson

Published in print: 2010-12-03

This study examines how the concept of conversion and specifically the legacy of the doctrine of preparation, as articulated in Puritan Reformed theology and transplanted to the Massachusetts Bay colony, remained a vital cultural force shaping developments in American literature and philosophy. It begins by discussing the testimonies of conversion collected by the Puritan minister Thomas Shepard, which reveal an active pursuit of belief by prospective church members occurring at the intersection of experience, perception, doctrine, affections, and intellect. This pursuit of belief, codified in the morphology of conversion, and originally undertaken by the Puritans as a way to conceptualize redemption in a fallen state, established the epistemological contours for what Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James would theorize as a conductive imaginary—consciousness imagined as a space organized or that self-organizes around the dynamics and tensions between abstract truth and concrete realities, certainty and uncertainty, and perception and objects perceived. Each writer offers a picture of consciousness as both a receptive and active force responsible for translating the effects of experience and generating original relations with self, community, and God. This study demonstrates that each writer “ministered” to their audiences by articulating a method or habit of mind in order to foster an individual’s continual efforts at regeneration, conceived by all the subjects of this study as a matter of converting semantics, that is, a dedicated willingness to seeking out personal and cultural renewal through the continual process of attaching new meaning and value to ordinary contexts.

This chapter examines the way in which Emerson has exerted tremendous imaginative influence over 20th-century literary critics, causing them to place his “American Scholar” at the center of their ...
More

This chapter examines the way in which Emerson has exerted tremendous imaginative influence over 20th-century literary critics, causing them to place his “American Scholar” at the center of their intellectual and cultural projects to remake America by redirecting the way it considered its past. Emerson's little-known involvement with the 1834 New York elections reveals how he assimilates political language so as to trope it. This innovative troping resists coercive and conventional modes of thought and discourse, but has also led to critical misreadings as to the social efficacy of Emerson's writing.Less

The Haunting of American Literature

Randall Fuller

Published in print: 2007-10-01

This chapter examines the way in which Emerson has exerted tremendous imaginative influence over 20th-century literary critics, causing them to place his “American Scholar” at the center of their intellectual and cultural projects to remake America by redirecting the way it considered its past. Emerson's little-known involvement with the 1834 New York elections reveals how he assimilates political language so as to trope it. This innovative troping resists coercive and conventional modes of thought and discourse, but has also led to critical misreadings as to the social efficacy of Emerson's writing.

On November 12, 1902, eighty-eight cases of antiquities and plaster casts of ancient sculpture arrived in San Francisco. Case 186, contained an inscribed portrait herm of Plato, which is now in the ...
More

On November 12, 1902, eighty-eight cases of antiquities and plaster casts of ancient sculpture arrived in San Francisco. Case 186, contained an inscribed portrait herm of Plato, which is now in the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology (PAHMA) on the Berkeley campus. Mrs. Hearst had employed Alfred Emerson, a classical scholar and friend of Benjamin Ide Wheeler, to acquire Greek and Roman antiquities in Rome as part of her plan for a museum that would bring together characteristic artifacts of ancient cultures for the edification of the citizens of northern California. The Plato hermwas purchased by Emerson from the Fratelli Iandolo, a well-known firm of antiquities dealers in Rome. The inventory catalogue entry for the piece includes this statement, handwritten at an unknown time: “Pertinence of head is not certain.”. This portrait herm has been left in total obscurity for more than a century.Less

History of Acquisition and the First Century in California

Stephen G. Miller

Published in print: 2009-04-11

On November 12, 1902, eighty-eight cases of antiquities and plaster casts of ancient sculpture arrived in San Francisco. Case 186, contained an inscribed portrait herm of Plato, which is now in the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology (PAHMA) on the Berkeley campus. Mrs. Hearst had employed Alfred Emerson, a classical scholar and friend of Benjamin Ide Wheeler, to acquire Greek and Roman antiquities in Rome as part of her plan for a museum that would bring together characteristic artifacts of ancient cultures for the edification of the citizens of northern California. The Plato hermwas purchased by Emerson from the Fratelli Iandolo, a well-known firm of antiquities dealers in Rome. The inventory catalogue entry for the piece includes this statement, handwritten at an unknown time: “Pertinence of head is not certain.”. This portrait herm has been left in total obscurity for more than a century.